Saint Steps In (25 page)

He
set the night latch on the door and went back to peer
out of the windows. The bare flat walls of the
building ex
tended safely around his outlook. There were
none of those balconies that he had wished for before, and no thoughtfully
planted fire escapes. Of course, a hook ladder
could get up or
a rope could get down;
but either of those expedients would
be
risking an upward glance from the street. The Saint drew
his head back from the rising grumble of traffic,
lowered the
sash to within a few inches of the sill, and balanced a
glass and
a couple of ashtrays precariously
on top of it, which would give
ample warning of any uninvited guests
from that direction.

He went back to the table and mixed himself a highball.
The ice in the pitcher had melted, but
the water was still cold. He sipped the drink at his leisure. It tasted
refreshing after the
heavy
brandy; The atmosphere was refreshing too, even with its thin keen bite of
suspense, after the febrile maelstrom that
he had just salvaged himself from.

He forced that
recollection out of his head again.

If there was nothing here, where else wouldn’t either Andrea
or the Ungodly want him to be. The only place he could
think of was Stamford.
Late as it was, he
made a phone call there. A male voice
that he hadn’t heard
before answered.

“Miss Gray? She isn’t here.”

“This is Simon Templar,” he said.

The voice said: “Oh.”

There was a longish pause, and then her voice came on the line—a little
sleepy and breathless, but perfectly natural and
unforced.

“I just
wanted to be sure you were all right,” he said.

“Of course I
am. Has anything happened?”

“Nothing
worth telling, I’m afraid. Have you had any
news?”

“No.”

“Are you being well looked after?”

“Oh, yes. Mr. Wayvern left the nicest man here—he’s as big
as a house and his hobby is
collecting butterflies.”

“Good. Tell him to be sure and stay awake so he can go on
adding to his collection.”

She hesitated a moment.

“Why
…
are you—expecting anything?”

“I’m
always expecting things. But don’t worry. I just want
to be sure he’s taking his job seriously.”

“Are you staying in New York tonight?”

“I guess I’ll have to. It’s probably a bit late for a train.
Anyhow, remember the story I’ve been
giving out is that
you’re
in New York, so it’ll look more convincing if I stay
here. By the way, I’m at the Savoy. I hope they’re
cursing the
joint already, wishing they
could find out what name I’ve got
you
registered under.”

There was another brief pause.

“Simon—do you think this’ll go on very long?”

“No,”
he said, with an easy confidence that didn’t have to
match the expression she couldn’t see. “Not very
long. I think
there’ll be plenty of things moving tomorrow.
And I’ll keep in
touch with you. Now go back
to bed and try to forget it until
breakfast.”

He
opened a fresh pack of cigarettes after he had hung up,
and paced the room as he had done hours before.

He
was still in the dark, and he could only try to get some
slim consolation out of the hope that
the Ungodly were
equally benighted. He wished
he felt more assured about stay
ing away
from Stamford. But if he had really been hiding
Madeline Gray in New York, the Ungodly would naturally ex
pect him to stay close to her. In fact, they might
have been
watching him from any point
in the evening in the hope that
he would lead them to her. That might
have been what Andrea
Quennel was worried
about. Or had she been worried? Had
she staged a terrific performance to
try and drive him into suspicion and from that into a false move? And how
would the
Ungodly think? If he had hurried
off to Stamford, would they
have
credited him with trying most cunningly to lead them off on
a false scent, and thereby have been convinced
that Made
line Gray actually was in
New York? Would they think that he w
ould
never be so reckless as to leave Madeline Gray in such
an exposed position as Stamford; or would they
think that
that was precisely what he
wanted them to think?
…
It was
a
game of solitaire played with chameleon cards.

And yet with all that, as he always remembered, he never
thought of the real danger.

He went to bed and slept eventually, since there was noth
ing else to do. It was ten o’clock when
he woke up, and he
knew that
he had been tired from the night before. He show
ered and began to dress; and he was debating whether
to get a
shave before breakfast or
have breakfast before the shave when
his door trembled with an unnecessarily vigorous knocking.

He
went and opened it, and raised his eyebrows involun
tarily at a familiar face that he had not seen for
some time.

“Why, Henry!” he exclaimed. “Fancy your finding me
here.”

The familiar figure filled the doorway with its shoulders.

“Fancy
my not finding you here,” retorted Inspector John
Henry Fernack harshly. “Come out and tell me
what you had
against
Imberline.”
  

3

It
all fell together in the Saint’s brain like an exact measure
of peanuts dropping into an envelope
from an automatic pack
aging
machine. It was so neat and final that he felt weirdly
calm about it, not even dallying for a moment over
the mecha
nism that made it happen.

He
said on one emotionless note: “He’s dead, is he?”

“You
should ask me,” Fernack replied sarcastically.

The
Saint nodded.

“I
shouldn’t. You wouldn’t be here if he was beefing about
somebody stealing one of his
cigars.”

Fernack glowered at him implacably. There was a lot of
history behind that glower. Aside from
being part of a routine
which has made this chronicler so popular with tax collectors
everywhere, it was rooted in a long
series of conflicts and
collisions that all flooded back into Fernack’s mind at such
times as this. It was a hard life for
him, as we must admit after
all
these years. Personally, he liked the Saint; in a peculiar
way, he respected him; as an honest
man, he had to admit that
in
a complete perspective the Saint had done far more for him
than he had undone; and yet as a
salaried custodian of the Law it seemed to Fernack that the Saint’s appearance
in any crime
was a doomful guarantee of
more strain and woe than any
policeman should have been legitimately asked to bear. Be
sides which, even if he had never
succeeded in compiling the
mundane legal evidence, he knew to his own satisfaction that the
Saint’s methods had a light-hearted and even lethal disre
gard for lawful processes which it was always going to be
his
duty to try and prove: it would be a
bitter triumph for him
when he achieved
it, and yet his consistent failure was no less
galling. It was, inevitably, a dilemma that couldn’t help having the
most corrosive effects on any conscientious police
man’s equanimity.

He
said, with almost reflex bluster: “Maybe you’d like to
have another look at him and see what
sort of a job you did?”

“I
would,” said the Saint.

Along the corridor, two uniformed men were holding back
a bunch of impatient reporters. An
assistant manager, torn
between retaining the goodwill of the press and avoiding un
desirable publicity, twittered unhappily to and fro. One of
the
reporters yelled: “Hey, Fernack,
d’you want a special edition
all to
yourself?” Another of them said: “Who’s that guy with
him?”

1013 seemed to be stocked full of busy toilers in plain
clothes. A police photographer was
packing up his equipment.
Other specialists
were working over the furniture with brushes and powder, wrapping exhibits,
opening drawers and closets,
picking up
things and putting them down. It was a scene of
prescribed antlike
activity that the Saint seemed to have seen rather a lot of lately.

The
body was on the bed, an amorphous mound suggestive
of human shape under a sheet, like the first rough
lumping of
a clay model.

Fernack
pulled the sheet back, Imberline looked as if he
might have been asleep with his mouth open. But his
eyes were
half open too, showing
only the whites. There was a folded
towel
under his head that showed red stains on it.

“What did he die of?” Simon asked.

“He fell down in the “bathroom and beat his brains out on
the floor,” Fernack said.
“Don’t you remember?”

“Old age does things to your memory,” Simon apologised.
“Tell me all about it.”

Fernack replaced
the sheet.

“Imberline left a call for seven-thirty this morning. That
was about twelve-thirty last night. His
telephone didn’t answer. They sent a housekeeper to check up. She looked in,
didn’t see him, and sent a maid in to
do the room. The maid
found him. His bed hadn’t been slept in. He was in the bath
room, wearing everything except his
coat, with his tie loosened
and
his collar unbuttoned—and dead.”

The Saint had a picture of Imberline as he had seen him last, i
n what was apparently Imberline’s
home-life costume.

“So he fell down in the bathroom and broke his head,” he
said.

“Yeah.
The back of his head was flattened to a pulp, and there was plenty of blood on
the tiles. If you can fall down
hard enough from where you stand to do that much damage
to yourself, I’d like to see
it.”

“I’m
afraid you would, Henry,” said the Saint sadly. “How
long has he been dead?”

“You know we can’t say that in minutes. But it was since
last night. And he left his call after you came in. The
telephone
operator remembers that it was
while you were still on your
call to
Stamford.”

“So of
course I did it, since I was in the building. Was there
anything else?”

“He’d been entertaining someone since he was out to din
ner. There was part of a bottle of
Scotch and a couple of dirty
glasses;
but one of them was wiped so there were no finger
prints on it. There were ashes and cigarette and cigar
ends.”

“When did he
come in?”

“About ten-thirty, as well as the desk clerk remembers.”

“Was he alone?”

“The elevator girl says he didn’t seem to be with anyone.”

“So naturally he was with me, since you remember my old
trick of becoming invisible.”

Fernack turned a broad back on him and prowled, glaring
at his subordinates. They were finishing their jobs and
becom
ing a little vague. Fernack drove them
out and shut the door
on them. Simon
lighted a cigarette and strolled around plac
idly.

Fernack faced him again with his rocky jaw set and his eyes
hard and uncompromising.

“Now,” he said heavily, “perhaps you’ll tell me a few
things.”

“I’d be glad
to,” said the Saint obligingly.

“When
I came to your room, you weren’t at all surprised
when I asked you about Imberline.”

“I’m
so
used
to you asking me extraordinary questions.”

“You didn’t even ask who he was.”

“Why should
I? I read the papers.”

“You even
knew that he’d been staying here.”

“I didn’t say so. But I wasn’t going to fall over backwards
if he was. It’s a good place to stay.
I even use it myself.”

“And you knew that he smoked cigars.”